Tableau1 Basics-Dashboards.pptx

Mafas Raheem | Lecturer | APU]
[raheem@staffemail.apu.edu.my]
Data Visualization
Using TABLEAU

Google Trends: Comparison As of 30th June 2020

Let’s look at some data…with statistical analysis

Let’s look at some data…visually
Source: Wikipedia

Why visualize?
Data visualization is not a personal preference, to be done “just in case some
people are more visual.” It is a necessity!
• The previous slide is a classic example of how some insights can only be
found through visualization.
The first step in understanding your data should always be to examine it visually.
Visualization can play a critical role in helping you figure out what the interesting
questions are.
Remember the picture superiority effect: pictures are retained at much higher
rates than words.

Why visualize?
A good visualization reduces the time to insight. Here’s a simple example:
You receive a report of monthly revenues by product and region. Which were
your five highest-revenue product/regions last month?

Why visualize?
Let’s add color:
Color automatically focused your brain – no mental calculations/comparisons needed!
For some applications, eliminating all distractions with a very simple viz
can be effective:

Using Color
FACT: approximately 8% of men worldwide are color blind.
• Avoid red/green palettes! Blue/orange is a good alternative.
• For continuous data, color ramps are effective.
• For discrete data, always try to limit colors (under 5 is ideal).
– The use of too many colors makes it hard to distinguish, and also requires
frequent referencing of the legend.
– If you limit yourself to just a few colors, then your audience can actually
remember what’s what. Be kind to your reader!

Color me impressed
Humans can only distinguish ~8 colors at a time
Using Color

Color Me Impressed
For quantitative data, color intensity and diverging palettes work well

Pie Charts – NO!
From visualization guru Edward Tufte: “the only worse design than a pie chart is several of
them.”
Pie charts are tempting because everyone understands what they are meant to convey (the
various parts of a whole), but it is much harder to compare slices of a pie than it is to compare
length or height (especially when slices become very thin):
Website Traffic by Month
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December 0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
Website Traffic by Month

Best Practices
Orient data so people can read it

Pre-attentive Visual
Attributes

How do Humans Like Their Data?

Tableau1 Basics-Dashboards.pptx

Let’s use the Superstore_US_2015 dataset in Tableau to explore various areas of
the tool/platform. You will have plenty of practice with this UI; this is just a quick
orientation so you will know the basics and can start exploring for yourself.
www.superdatascience.com/tableau --> Superstore_US_2015.xlsx
Menus & Toolbar

New sheet tabs are found at
the bottom.
We can create sheets,
dashboards, and stories with
these tabs.
We can also do things like
rename the sheets, drag to
rearrange them, duplicate
sheets, copy formatting, and
many other things.
New Sheet
Create a new sheet – this is a blank sheet. Sheets are
where we build visualizations.

At the top, we have the menus. (The layout may look slightly different on a Mac.).
The menus contain a lot of powerful controls – after today’s class, every student
should spend some time clicking through to see what options they contain.
Below is the toolbar, with buttons like undo – there is no limit to how much you can
undo, and this is a very important button that allows you to explore! (will be grayed
out since we have not yet done anything)
Here we also have save – there’s no automatic save in Tableau, so make sure to
save your work periodically.
Menus & Toolbar

Menus & Toolbar
Menus – Various
menus available with
sub-menus.
Toolbar– Relevant
tools are also
available in the
toolbar underneath
the menu bar.

On the left of the screen is the data window.
If we’re on the data tab, the top lists all open data connections, and
depending on which one is selected, the fields from that data source
are listed below, broken out into dimensions and measures.
The data window will also show any sets or parameters you may have.
Data Window

Shelves & Cards
Every worksheet in Tableau
contains shelves and cards, such
as Columns, Rows, Marks,
Filters, Pages, Legends, and
more.
By placing fields on shelves or
cards, you:
Build the structure of your
visualization.
Increase the level of detail and
control the number of marks in
the view by including or
excluding data.

Shelves & Cards
Filter shelf – this is an
important feature that you are
likely to use a lot
Drag Product Category to
Filters as an example, and
then Show Filter (formerly
Show Quick Filter)
If you don’t want the “All”
option for some reason, just
click the Quick Filter’s drop-
down menu and look under
Customize.

Shelves & Cards
Add context to the visualization by
encoding marks with color, size,
shape, text, and detail.
Experiment with placing fields on
different shelves and cards to find
the optimal way to look at your
data.
• Marks Card
The Marks Card is made up of
several other shelves, each of
which can have fields placed on
them and can be clicked on to
edit their characteristics

Add New Dashboards & Stories
Note that we can also add a new dashboard or story instead of a simple
sheet. There are ways to organize multiple sheets in a single view or sequence
of views – we will cover them in detail later.

The Shaffer 4 C’s of Data Visualization
Clear – Easily seen; sharply
defined
• Who’s the audience? What’s
the message?
• Clarity more important than
aesthetics
Clean – thorough; complete;
unadulterated
• Labels, axis, gridlines,
formatting, right chart type,
color choice, etc.
Concise – brief but
comprehensive
• Not minimalists but not verbose
Captivating – to attract and hold
by beauty or excellence
• Does it capture attention? Is it
interesting? Does it tell the
story?

SECTION 1: GETTING STARTED
This is an Excel file
SuperStoreUS_2015.xlsx
PRACTICAL 1: INTERFACE EXPLORATION
Basic
Data Visualization Chart
4 minutes and
59 seconds

Open Tableau  Connect  Excel File 
SuperStoreUS_2015.xlsx
Choose the Order tab
Connect the data set

Question:
Find out which state or
province is making the
maximum profit from the
given data sheet.
First Step:
Take a look at the
dimensions and
measures which can
answer the given
question.
Tableau Worksheet

Paying Attention to Pill Color

When we bring a field into the view from the Data Window, Tableau creates a pill. The pill color
indicates whether the pill is continuous or discrete. Discrete pills are BLUE, Continuous pills are
GREEN.
Paying Attention to Pill Color
Continuous
Discrete
Text and categories
are inherently
discrete. Numbers
can also be discrete
if they can only take
one of a limited set
of distinct, separate
values. On the
other hand,
numbers are
continuous if they
can take on any
value in a range.

In Tableau, dimensions set the granularity, or the level of detail in the view. Think of
them as the things you group by or drill down by. Dimensions are usually (but not
always) categorical fields such as Order Priority and City.
It does not make sense to think about computing an average city or average priority
(these are words) – it makes sense to slice or group the data using these fields. We
typically want to view our data by some combination of these categories.
What dimensions we use to build the view will determine how many marks we have
– Order Priority has 4 categories, so it would give us 4 marks.
Dimensions & Measures

Measures are usually numerical data like Shipping Cost. Inside of Tableau,
measures are aggregations – they’re aggregated up to the granularity set by the
dimensions in the view. Think of them as the data elements that you want to perform
calculations on.
The value of a measure therefore depends on the context of the dimensions. For
example, the result for the sum of Shipping Cost (double click it) is different if we
have no dimensions in the view (just a single overall sum) versus when we add
Order Priority (double click it) as a dimension – now we have a sum for each
priority level.

Remember:
Dimensions
come out onto
the view as
themselves
Measures
come out onto
the view as
aggregates

New sheet. Let’s look at things
by Year – drag Order Date to
Columns.
If I then add a continuous pill, it
creates an axis – drag Profit to
Rows, change to bar chart.
Now we have an axis showing
profit measure for quarter of the
year.
Axis vs. Label

New sheet, drag Order Date to columns again, now drag something discrete to rows – Product
Sub-Category. Now it gives a series of panes. Let’s put some numbers in those panes. For
example, drag Shipping Cost to color to create a heat map (more on those later).
Axis vs. Label

PRACTICAL 2:
CALCULATED VALUES AND BASIC CHARTS

Download the
OfficeSupplied.csv
data set from
https://www.superdatas
cience.com/pages/table
au
Loading and viewing the data set

It’s EOFY and that
means time for annual
bonuses!
The store operates in
three regions and only
the top-performing
employee in each
region qualifies for a
bonus.
Find out which three
employees are eligible
(based on total sales $)
to get bonuses for this
year.
Task

www.superdatascience.com
PRACTICAL 3:
TIME SERIES, AGGREGATION AND FILTERS

• Draw a line chart using Period and Unemployed + add Granularity
Working with TIMESERIES

Observing the data points and the granularity
Granularity
the scale or level of detail
in a set of data.

Analysis -> Aggregate Measures (Uncheck)
Change the Line chart to a shape chart to view every single data point
Uncheck Aggregate Measures

Aggregate Vs. Uncheck aggregate Measures

Increasing Granularity
Create an Area Chart to
visualize the Long term
unemployment statistics
with granularity at
Month level and Age as
detail
Gender  Filters Shelf
Add as Quick Filter

Dashboards & Stories
A way to visualise multiple sheets together. Visualizing all the sheets together in an
effective way to analyse the data and enable better decision making

PRACTICAL 4:
Dashboards and Storytelling

How to set Geographical roles?
There are no dimensions or measures with the Globe
symbol which can be used for geographical input.
Also, there is no measure with the name Latitude and
Longitude that can be used in a map!!
Which field denote a geographical region?
Region  Geographic Role  State/Province

Set color to region & Table Calculation

Quick Table Calculations
Quick table calculations allow you to quickly
apply a common table calculation to your
visualization using the most typical settings
for that calculation type.

Creating Bins & Distributions
Sometimes it's useful to convert a continuous measure (or a numeric dimension)
into bins.
Any discrete field in Tableau can be considered as a set of bins.

Visualise customers by Age bins
Now the Age (Bin) appears in Dimensions
(in blue color). The Measure ‘Age’ has been
converted to Age (Bins) which is a category
now.
Binning is a way to group a number
of more or less continuous values into
a smaller number of "bins".

Visualise customers by Balance bins
Clue: Create bins with the size of 10000

Leveraging the power of parameters
In data discovery and exploration, the design of
data visuals should be agile and fast.
For instance, how to change the size of the
Balance bins during presentation mode?
The normal steps are:
Go to Balance(bins)  Right Click  Edit 
Change the size of the bins
This is a very tedious process when the size of
the bin has to be changed multiple times.
Hence, parameters are controls which gives us
easy access to do the same.

Create parameter for Balance bin
Use allowable values: Range (5000, 25000, 5000)

Create parameter for Age
Use allowable values: List (1, 5, 10)

Use treemaps to display data in
nested rectangles. You use
dimensions to define the structure
of the treemap, and measures to
define the size or color of the
individual
rectangles. Treemaps are a
relatively simple data visualization
that can provide insight in a
visually attractive format.
Create Tree map
Tree map chart to visualise the
job classification and total
number of records.

Create a Customer Segmentation Dashboard

Create a Dashboard – Check the sheets

Dashboard
A dashboard is a
collection of several
views, letting you
compare a variety of
data simultaneously.
Like worksheets,
you
access dashboards
from tabs at the
bottom of a
workbook

Adding an Interactive Action Filter

Highlighting is different compared to Filtering
Filter – allows only the values selected. The other values are removed
from view
Highlight – retains all values and highlights the selected values.
Highlighting Vs. Filter

Create a story in Tableau
A story is a sequence of visualisations that work together to convey information. You can
create stories to tell a data narrative, provide context, demonstrate how decisions relate
to outcomes or to simply make a compelling case.

PersonalVehicleSalesGlobal.xlsx
https://www.superdatascience.com/pages/tableau

Questions
1. Visualize the total value of the vehicles sold by year
2. Visualize the total value of the vehicles sold by year and region
3. Visualize the total value of the vehicles sold by year and region in
percentages
4. Visualize the geographical map by the sales value of vehicles sold
and filter by year
5. Create a dashboard
6. Create a storyline on the above visuals.

• In general, there are four types of joins that you can use to combine your data
in Tableau: inner, left, right, and full outer.
• The tables you can join and the different join types you can use depend on the
database or file you connect to.
• You can tell which join types your data supports by checking the join dialog
after you've connected to your data and have at least two tables on the canvas.
• Source: https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-
us/joining_tables.htm
Joins in Tableau

• Dataset:
https://www.superdatascience.com/pages/tabl
eau
Section 4: Maps and Scatterplots
Create a customer scatter plot
The attached excel file has three tabs. In
this section we will use only the first two.
AmazingMartEU2.xlsx

Create a customer scatter plot

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_b
est_stats_you_ve_ever_seen
The best stats you
have seen…!

www.superdatascience.com/tableau-advanced
Animations (Additional Topic)

The Challenge
You have been hired by the World Bank as a Tableau Developer.
Your first assignment is to deliver an animated visual/dashboard showing how
populations of countries across World have been developing over the past 50 years.
Specifically, the stakeholders of this assignment are interested to see overall trends
in fertility, life expectancy and population. In addition to overall trends they would
like to be able to drill into individual countries.

• Data preparation:
• Pivot the fields with year
• Rename the pivot fields
and names appropriately
Connecting the Data Sources

IronViz Vizforsocialgood Storytellingwithdata
https://vimeo.com/148163183

Tableau1 Basics-Dashboards.pptx

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